Tag Archive: plantbased

So, I’ve been a vegan for a week and it doesn’t feel like a decision I had to make or a lifestyle I now have to follow, but rather just what and how I am supposed to be. But that may be because I am in the honeymoon phase and all these replacement/additional/delicious meal options are exciting, shiny and new.

In a week/month/year I may be gagging for bacon, desperate for a chop or dreaming about biltong. (This is what happened when I did the vegetarian thing for a year previously.)

If that happens, I will deal with it then. It certainly doesn’t mean that my feeling of rightness now is any less valuable or real.

But why? I am asked. In the name off all red and meaty (and delicious) WHY?

Well, there is a MEAL of reasons.

Me

I don’t want to consume all of the antibiotics and other bits and pieces injected and fed into animals bred for slaughter.

I think there is a correlation between many cancers and eating animals.

My body does not like vast amounts of meat and other flesh – my stomach rebels, I feel sluggish and tired, I am always hungry.

When I tried banting, which is animal eating in the extreme, I got eczema and gastritis. I know I don’t need to eat that much meat and animal products, but the fact that this was my body’s response made me question wanting to put any of it in my body at all.

Earth

The carbon footprint of animal products for eating is just ridiculously massive.

Grass fed, organic-style animals have a bigger footprint that feedlot ones. So, so much for that being the response to me not wanting antibiotics etc.

The Earth cannot sustain us – there are too many of us consuming too much. Eating plantbased meals simply and easily reduces my carbon footprint.

Animal Lives

This is the actual, real, final reason I just couldn’t eat flesh and other animal products any more. (Because let’s not pretend animals bred for products other than meat are treated any better than those slaughters to eat.)

It’s a story so settle down – no gruesome crying piglet images, I promise (except the one I just put in your head).

In April 2016 I made a series of decisions which resulted in my beautiful dog Pippa being hit and killed by a car. I didn’t do it on purpose but as the human in the relationship, it was my fault. I let her do something which directly and specifically resulting in her being hit by the car. So yes, it was my fault.

And her death agonises me still. I dream about her, I miss her, I feel so guilty that I made decisions which resulted in her death.

And yet I was happy to get up and chose to eat bacon for breakfast and not even think about the animal I was killing with that decisions. I’d buy wors and chops and steak for a braai and never even consider the farmyard I was sending to their death. Eggs, milk, cream and cheese – yum yum and screw the animals kept in captivity, treated like crap, separated from their mothers when still needing her milk, slaughtered at birth if male, and finally, possibly mercifully, killed

Why do we think some animals are worth loving and protecting while others are commodities to be treated appallingly and then destroyed?

We don’t need animal products to be healthy; in fact, we may well be healthier without them.

So, yeah, that’s why I am just not going to consume anything an animal suffered to produce.

Cos those random cows, lambs, sheep, chicken and even fish deserve life as much as Pippa did.

Also – I watched Food Choices on Netflix which actually consolidated all of these thoughts.